


looks on tempests, and is never shaken

by lapoubelle



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, F/M, Fluff, a lil bit of smut but not really, and gryffindor references pertaining to bellamy (but really bob)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-24
Updated: 2016-09-24
Packaged: 2018-08-16 23:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,811
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8121694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lapoubelle/pseuds/lapoubelle
Summary: So what, she’s in denial. Clarke is just facing an existential crisis regarding her not-actually-friend friend. To be fair though, that fine distinction between being her friend and not being her friend now has different barriers. In the first two years of knowing Bellamy in college, she hesitated to call him her friend because she honestly didn’t know if they were even that close. Now, calling Bellamy her friend just didn’t seem to cut it.  or, four times Bellamy helps Clarke out, and one time Clarke helps him out.





	

**Author's Note:**

> title borrowed from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116. 
> 
> in this fic, i refer to _Frankenstein_ , John Donne, and _Hamilton_. and also Bob Morley for James Potter.

I.

Clarke doesn’t _need_ this class. She doesn’t need it. Really. 

That’s what she tells herself anyway. She knows she needs her English credit to graduate, but fuck—if Wallace can’t teach why Mary Shelley wrote such an absurd character that is Victor Frankenstein then she should be allowed to write an equally absurd term paper regarding said fictitious asshole. 

But she does need it. She needs this stupid first year English class to graduate and get into med school. She has A Plan. 

But—

Actually, no. There is no buts. 

“Fuck,” she mutters quietly. Raven’s quietly snoring away in her own bed across their dorm, because she’s done all her midterms. Stupid Engineering program with meticulous planning and tight schedules working in favour of Raven finishing all her midterm exams before Clarke. 

She glances at the clock, bright red digital numbers glaring against the dark room illuminated only by Clarke’s laptop screen. 

_2:32 AM._

Her Genetics lecture is in six hours and she wants to cry and give up. 

And that’s how she finds herself trudging up two floors up and fishing Bellamy’s spare key taped behind the white board that Octavia mockingly gifted him when he became RA of the fifth floor. 

It’s dark when she enters, she expects as much because Bellamy is an actual grandpa and passes out at midnight when Octavia isn’t trying to get him to expand his friend group beyond Miller. 

She kneels on the bed, looms over his curled body as he sleeps on his side and grasps his shoulders. 

“Bellamy!” she whispers, turning him onto his back to see his face.

She shakes harder, pressing into his shoulders harder and plants both knees on either side of his hips. “Bellamy!” she says, more urgent now.

“What the—“

“Hi.”

“Clarke?” His eyes flutter, blinking sleep away. 

“I need your help.”

“What?” 

“What do you know about Professor Wallace and Victor Frankenstein?”

_“What the fuck.”_

“Bellamy, please! I need your help. This paper’s due in ten hours and all I have is the fact that Victor is a whiny man child.”

Bellamy props himself up on his elbows, his eyes squinting as his arm stretches over his head to grasp the back of his neck.

This is when Clarke realizes he’s not wearing a shirt. 

Which, of course, makes sense. The man was sleeping after all. 

But she can’t help but glare at him a little harder as if it was his own fault that she’s checking him out. 

As if she even had a choice, like, let’s be real here. The man is built from stone. As if hand sculpted by Michelangelo himself. 

And Clarke’s seen her fair share of male bodies before. She is a high school junior and has had enough hook ups to be familiar with the anatomy of a male body. She’s seen a lot of naked bodies before. So she should really be immune at this point. 

Bellamy groans, interrupting her wandering eyes. 

“Can you repeat that again, maybe this time at a lower pitch.”

Clarke rolls her eyes and plops herself next to him instead. Better than her sitting atop his lap. “My term paper for Wallace’s Issues in Literature and Culture class is due at noon and I have nothing.”

“Okay, show me this nothing.”

She beams and gets up to collect her laptop and second hand copy of Frankenstein from her backpack. 

“So far I have that Victor is an actual dick bag that blames the world for his mistakes.”

She settles in, digging further into Bellamy’s bed as he takes her laptop from her while shaking his head. 

“Can’t say I disagree you with there, but what about we try saying that in a way that will not personally offend Wallace.”

Clarke snorts. “Is that even possible? Everything I do offends Wallace, it’s practically a long running gag joke in our lectures nowadays.”

She sends Bellamy a picture of the bright red A- four days later. 

 

II.

Clarke brings the phone to her ear as glances back at the trashed front yard of Delta Omega Rho’s house on Greek Row. Littered with kegs and forgotten solo cups, the lone tree’s leaves shivering in the cold January wind. 

She toys with the short hem line of her skirt, goose bumps forming along her forearm. 

“Bellamy?”

“Clarke? Hello?”

“I’m so sorry but I don’t know who else to call, can you pick me up?”

She hears the static in the background and she can picture Bellamy getting out of bed, pushing his covers down. 

“Yeah, where are you?” he says, after a beat.

She signs a breath of relief and tells him, sending furtive glances over her shoulder towards the house. 

He tells her to keep tight and she hears him shut his door. 

Ten minutes later she’s pointedly avoiding his confused eyes as she buckles herself into the passenger seat of his car. 

He sighs. “What happened in there?”

“Lexa showed up.”

He doesn’t say anything then. Just turns the heat up and drives ahead, his eyes softening. 

A few minutes later, they’re pulling up in the parking lot of her favourite waffle place near campus. 

She smiles softly, almost forgetting her mood. “Waffles?”

Bellamy smiles back, his eyes crinkling on the sides and Clarke forgets to breathe a little. “C’mon.”

Clarke sometimes forgets just how well Bellamy knows her. How could he not? He’s been the one constant in her life since she went away for college. 

They’re not friends exactly. 

He’s just always _there_. Even before they grudgingly accepted the other’s presence in their lives, no matter what happened, Bellamy was just there. From the first day of the first class they shared together in her freshman year and his sophomore. She, voicing her opinion on John Donne’s Holy Sonnets, and he, firing off his snarky response about metaphysical poetry being a bunch of pretentious men trying to sound smart (which, she does agree, but she loves Donne’s Holy Sonnets anyway, so of course she has to fight back). To her confronting him in the lobby of her dorm building, two weeks later, accusing him of stalking her as he walked a few paces behind her for two blocks, only for him to lightly shove past her and smugly retort that he so happens to live there too. 

Fast forward three years later, now both in their second-to-last semester as undergrads and no matter what memory Clarke conjures up from her undergrad experience, Bellamy is always somehow involved. 

Bellamy’s a force that has no immediate impact. She can’t even remember a time from when she transitioned from calling Wells for help across the country to breaking into Bellamy’s dorm at two in the morning for help. Slowly but surely, he crept his way in. And now he’s the only constant in Clarke’s life besides Raven. 

But still. They’re not friends, exactly. 

Clarke doesn’t really know what they are. 

But of course, Bellamy knows to go to Vera’s Waffle House. He just does. 

 

III. 

She’s shading in the duodenum of her intestine diagram when she feels the table shaking. She should, technically, be alarmed and think it’s an earthquake. She is born and raised in California where fault lines are plenty and the threat of earthquakes are ever present. But truth be told, Clarke’s running on four hours of sleep over the last three days and if an earthquake were to occur on the east coast and interrupt her MCAT prep session then all hell hath no fury like a woman deprived of her chance to get the fucking MCATs over with. 

She looks up, a scowl already forming on her face.

She meets Bellamy’s questioning eyes, amusement clear on his face. 

“Clarke,” he says slowly, “you need to rest.”

She flits her eyes down to the fist he still has on her table, his pinky overtop the left aorta of the heart diagram she drew last night. 

“Bellamy—“ 

He sighs, already preparing for battle. “Clarke, seriously. Are you even retaining the information you’ve been muttering the last two hours?”

Clarke scrunches up her nose and glances back down at her work. It is pretty impressive, if she does say so for herself. “Duh.”

Bellamy raises his eyebrows. “Take a break.”

Clarke refuses. 

And that’s how they found themselves six hours later, in the early hours of the next day. Bellamy laying on the ledge of the window, while she’s sitting on the lone couch in the library’s fourth floor. Surrounded by papers and open MCAT prep books while Bellamy reads aloud the flashcards he prepared two hours ago, quizzing her. 

“Tell me about fluctuating blood sugar concentrations and the enzyme insulin.”

She fires off her response as Bellamy nods along, giving his word of approval once she’s through. 

Clarke can hear the exhaustion in Bellamy’s voice. She tells him so, and all she gets is a snort.

She hears him get up and jump off the ledge. “Speak for yourself, Princess.”

She turns to look at him, ready to retort. But she sees him stretch his arms over his head, back cracking as he sways back. His shirt inches up his torso, revealing the edge of his boxers peeking out past his jeans. His shirt stretching tight across his broad chest.

Her mouth goes dry. 

Fuck. Maybe she should get some sleep. 

“If I take a short nap on the couch, promise you won’t pack up my stuff and move me to my bed?”

Bellamy pretends to ponder it for a moment. “No promises.”

Clarke scoffs. But she’s already pushing her books to the floor, only half heartedly making sure that pages aren’t getting folded up, so long as they stay in the right order. 

She hears Bellamy chuckle. “I think you’re underestimating how exhausted I am too. There’s now way I can lug my things, your things, and you across campus in this state. Get some sleep.”

“You too,” she manages to mumble into her arm, before succumbing to her heavy eyes and the strong pull of sleep. 

 

IV.

“Seriously? Of all times to be late in your entire undergrad life, you choose graduation day?”

Clarke looks up from her phone to Bellamy, standing against Octavia’s dorm room door, wearing his graduation cap that Octavia made him wear while they took photos out in the hall. 

Her eyes rush down his frame, from the swinging black tassel to his pressed white collar, maroon tie (she remembers picking out that tie for him to wear, something about Gryffindor colours making her smile and when she presents it to him with the reasoning behind the colour choice, he blushes), and black slacks that fit him really, _really_ well. 

“I overslept, thanks to Octavia, mind you.”

Octavia had insisted that Clarke sleepover in her dorm room the night before the convocation. And really, Clarke hadn’t seen a good reason not to. It’s been two weeks since she moved out of the campus for good, and it’s weird being back for convocation, in a good way. She’s thankful Octavia picked up on the sentimental feelings Clarke was flooded with when going back to pick up her cap and gown and asked her if she wanted to have one last hurrah in the dorms before finally moving on with her life, post-undergrad. 

Of course, to Octavia, that meant the full gong-show of saying a bittersweet farewell to drinking vodka in her dorm and yelling at the TV while watching _Say Yes to the Dress_. 

It was fun. They even managed to get Raven on Facetime for twenty minutes at three in the morning before the time zone had to remind them that Raven is in Switzerland, getting her Master’s Degree, and is therefore not exactly in the right state of mind to appreciate a drunk Octavia telling her that mermaid weddings dresses were _so 2012_ and Clarke braiding her own hair while telling Raven that she’s going to send a fully armed battalion to remind her of her love. 

But now, six hours later, with their convocation starting in an hour, Clarke is so not having fun. 

She can’t reach the stupid zipper of her dress and Octavia disappeared somewhere, leaving Bellamy propped up against her door looking like _that_. 

“Are you ready?” Bellamy asks, now it’s his turn as his eyes sweep down her form. 

Clarke looks away, unable to meet his eyes. “No.” 

Bellamy raises his eyebrows at her petulant tone, stepping further into the room.

He inclines his head, his signal for her to elaborate.

“I can’t zip up my dress because my arms are too short.”

Bellamy laughs and Clarke steps closer to stop the back and forth swinging of his tassel as his shoulders shake with mirth. 

She waits for him to stop laughing before she meets his eyes. For a second they just stare at each other. Bellamy’s grin falls slowly into a sheepish smile. “Want some help?”

Clarke nods slowly, her eyes tracing the way the corners of his mouth rise. 

She spins around, giving Bellamy access to the back of her open dress. 

She feels his fingers first. Warm against the chill that crept onto her shoulder blades from having her dress hanging open for so long. He hooks the button into the clasp first. Then his fingers gently latch onto her dress, tugging the two halves a little closer together. His hands follow the length of her dress from her shoulders to the small of her back. The tips of his fingers just barely kissing her skin as it travels down, pulling the two sides closer together. This causes the front of the dress to tighten a fraction, causing Clarke’s stance to straighten, her chest pushing out and neck falling back. She feels Bellamy’s cheek then, just a breath away from the side of her forehead, the sides of her hair gently caressing his jaw. 

Her hands go into fists, suddenly in need of something to release tension on. She feels his own hands on her dress tighten, as if he has the same physical reaction to their closeness. Her breaths are heavier now, and she’s sure Bellamy feels it. Her chest rising higher and higher after each breath, stretching her dress further. 

She calms her breathing, counting to three as she inhales and three more as she exhales. 

Moments later, Bellamy resumes the path he’s scorching down her skin until he reaches the zipper at the bottom. One hand clasps the zipper primly between fingers, and sudden lack of hands holding her dress tight to her body causes her to sway a little. She grounds her feet into the wood floor at the same time Bellamy’s hand clasps onto her hip to steady her. 

At this time, Clarke realizes that neither of them have spoken in what feels like forever. But she has nothing to say, and she doesn’t quite trust herself to speak right now. Knowing that there are only two possible things she could say: 1) declare her undying feelings for him or 2) brush it off and pretend this is purely a platonic thing that all platonic friends do and hoo- _fucking_ -ray for being platonic.

His fingers spread across her hips, she feels the warmth of his palm on her hip bone and the pads of his fingers digging themselves into the softness of her belly. The hand tightens for a moment just as he begins pulling the zipper up. 

The sound of the zipper gliding its way up her dress is so jarring compared to the silence that has fallen between the two of them. It reminds her of her surroundings. She blinks, her eyes focusing on a plotted plant on the windowsill, and she is reminded of Octavia. And the fact that they’re currently standing in the middle of Octavia’s dorm room. 

And here she is enjoying the feel of Bellamy’s arm clutching on her hip and his warm breath ghosting the short hairs on the back of her neck. 

As soon as Bellamy’s zipped up her dress fully and his hand no longer has a reason to hold onto her like that and falls back to his side, she steps away, ducking her head. She can’t look at him right now. 

He coughs. “I’ll meet you downstairs.”

She can’t help but notice that his voice is lower, rougher. 

She nods, suddenly not trusting her own. She waits to glance at the door until she hears his footsteps fade down the hall. 

With one last look in a mirror, she checks to make sure her face isn’t flushed.

When she finds that it is, she reaches for a bottle of water sitting on Octavia’s dress and chugs half of it hoping it would calm her nerves and regulate her body again. 

If Octavia notices, she can always chock it up to too much blush. 

She quickly slips on her heels and finds her cap and gown tucked away in Octavia’s closet, where she hung it up last night. 

With one last calming breath, she closes Octavia’s door behind her and makes for the stairs where she knows Bellamy’s waiting. 

 

\+ I.

 

They’re at a bar. That’s kind of when shit hit the fan for the two of them. 

Four months after convocation found Bellamy and Clarke in a nightclub in the middle of the city, a far cry from the dive bars they frequented during their undergrad years. 

“Bellamy, it’s your turn!” Miller crows, raising his empty beer. He’s definitely not sober, by how loud he’s being, it’s easy to tell. 

Bellamy rolls his eyes and gets up from their booth, nudging Jasper out of the way as he goes. 

They’re all dressed up tonight, with Octavia insisting on a dress code to celebrate their maturity of going from run down dive bars half a block from campus to pretentious nightclubs in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan where a bottle of Jack Daniels costs roughly three hundred dollars. 

So Clarke’s not really to blame when she stares after Bellamy’s retreating back. She’s just appreciating his nice shoulder-to-hip ratio. 

Clarke is not averse to appreciating pretty things. Her thing is art, after all. 

“Geez Clarke, could you be any less obvious.”

Her eyes flash to Raven’s, eyeing her best friend’s dangerous smirk and raised eyebrows. 

She pointedly sips her jack and coke (which was more coke than jack, because Clarke is a responsible adult who has a shitty morning lecture the next day). 

She sees Raven shaking her head from the corner of her eye. 

So what, she’s in denial. Clarke is just facing an existential crisis regarding her not-actually-friend friend. 

To be fair though, that fine distinction between being her friend and not being her friend now has different barriers. In the first two years of knowing Bellamy in college, she hesitated to call him her friend because she honestly didn’t know if they were even that close. 

Now, calling Bellamy her friend just didn’t seem to cut it. 

Bellamy was way more than a friend to her. 

She can accept that now. 

But that leaves her unable to label Bellamy’s place in her life. 

She looks to Raven again, seeing her best friend watching her. Clarke scrunches up her nose, pouting her lips and mouths, “Fuck.”

Raven’s laughter turns heads. 

Jasper complains that the beers are taking too long, and Clarke turns her head towards the direction that she last saw Bellamy. 

Octavia agrees, stretching her arm across the back of the booth to raise up on her knees and locate her brother. 

She spots his unruly mess of curls in the crowd. The nightclub is dark, but the electrifying spurts of neon lights allows Clarke to spot him, leaning against the bar. 

With a girl. 

“Looks like he met someone, Jasper,” Maya says. 

Clarke fails to notice all eyes turn on her for half a second, because she’s still staring at the way Bellamy rubs the back of his neck while looking down at the girl. She’s talking animatedly, with hand gestures and everything. 

“Um,” Clarke bites her lips, “I’ll be right back.”

She makes her way to Bellamy, eyes locked on the hand of the strange woman currently wrapped around the forearm Bellamy has propped on the bar. 

Clarke knows she’s not drunk. She kept a watchful eye as the bartender prepared her jack and coke, making sure the ratio of jack to coke reflects her shitty morning class the next day. So the high pitch of her voice as she calls out to Bellamy is all her. 

The arm placed on the bar conveniently falls as he turns toward the sound of her voice, interrupting whatever it is the woman was saying. 

“Babe! Jasper’s getting a little impatient with the lack of alcohol at our table,” Clarke hears herself cooing. 

She swears by the grace of all that is good that she is completely sober. Mostly. Technically, there is still a portion of her drink dedicated to the first half of its name.

But she’s definitely sober enough to feel Bellamy tense up as she wraps her arm around his waist and presses the length of her body against his side. 

She has no idea what the fuck she’s doing but she temporarily forgets how she should be panicking right now about her life choices because she feels Bellamy respond to her sudden proximity by wrapping his own arm around his shoulders and pulling her in, so, really, Clarke can afford a couple more bad life choices, she thinks. 

It feels so fucking natural and good that Clarke knows she can’t just have this be a one-time thing. 

She looks up at Bellamy, she’s close enough to feel the warmth of his breaths against her forehead. Tilting her chin up, she meets his eyes and raised eyebrows. 

Not knowing how to deal with him just yet, she turns her attention to the gaping woman in front of them. “Sorry, our friends are total assholes.”

The woman looks between them one more time before answering, “Speaking of friends, I should probably get back to mine.”

And without waiting for an answer, she flashes them a quick smile and heads off. Clarke watches her shake her head as she gets lost within the throng of people lining the dance floor. 

She suddenly feels Bellamy’s fingers rhythmically tapping against her arm, his arm still banded across her shoulders. But instead of acknowledging her or moving it away, he inclines his torso towards the bar, using his free arm to wave over a bartender and prattling off a list of drinks for their table. 

The bartender tells him he’ll bring over their drinks in a little bit.Bellamy then steers them towards the direction of their table, all the while keeping their rather intimate position perfectly in tact. 

And that’s kind of how the whole night goes.

Easily, Bellamy and Clarke slip into the booth, their bodies still intimately intertwined. To accommodate their new position, Clarke’s arm slipped from his waist and now sits high on his thigh while his thumb now draws lazy circles against her bare arm. She’s leaning into him now too. 

What’s killing Clarke is the fact that they have yet to say one word to each other. The only thing that reminds Clarke that this isn’t a regular thing is when Jasper’s eyes got annoyingly big and looked between the two of them. Otherwise, no one has batted an eye or made any innuendoes that Clarke and Bellamy would have expected. 

As the night wore on, their touches became more and more liberated. Clarke has taken to nosing Bellamy’s collarbone, while Bellamy’s fingers have slipped under the thick strap of her dress and is now finger the lace strap of her bra. And rather than idly laying her hand on his thigh, she is now absentmindedly raking her fingers against the grainy texture of his slacks. 

So as their friends around them became less and less conscious of the world surrounding them, Clarke has become more aware and alert. Woken up by the fiery path that Bellamy burns with his fingers across her shoulder. She feels heat pool at the juncture of her thighs, her nape getting hot, as her wandering hand fingers the crease where his thigh meets his hip. She feels his fingers suddenly stop, instead they dig into her shoulder as she feels his breath stutter against her forehead. 

Almost within a blink of an eye, Bellamy’s contented slouch against their booth snaps alert, if Clarke wasn’t already so wound up she would’ve been more affected by his sudden shift. 

He pressed a quick kiss against her forehead. And she almost misses the word he whispers, his voice shaking, “Later.”

With one last squeeze, Bellamy lets her go and starts rousing their friends. 

__________

 

Twenty minutes later, they locate their own cab as Clarke watches Octavia and Lincoln’s own cab drive away. 

Holy shit, this is happening. 

She’s going home with Bellamy. Bellamy fucking Blake. 

It’s happening. 

They have yet to rekindle their connection, Bellamy’s last squeeze to her shoulder still feeling like some weird muscle memory that Clarke can’t let go. 

The cab ride to Bellamy’s apartment is filled with sexual tension so thick Clarke couldn’t meet the driver’s eyes as she thanked him through the window. 

She follows Bellamy into his building, steps into the elevator and watches as Bellamy presses the button for the 11th floor. She feels relief wash over her when she sees a little bit of a tremor in his hand. 

Good. She’s not the only feeling like a live wire that’s about to implode in on herself. 

They make it. Just barely. 

As soon as the front door of his apartment is shut, she’s reaching for his neck the same time he’s reaching for her hips. They pull and tug and suddenly she’s pushed up against the door and biting down on Bellamy’s bottom lip. 

His mouth is cold from the ice water he’s been drinking ever since they got back to the booth. Neither of them touched alcohol since. 

Bellamy’s tongue leaves her mouth to gently scrape his teeth against her bottom lip. Clarke gasps, her head snapping back and hitting front door. 

“Fuck,” she hears Bellamy groan against her jaw. 

She feels his fingers dig into her flesh, pulling her closer to his body as he continues to lick words into her neck. 

He pulls her up, walks her around the still dark hallway of his apartment. She feels cold stone against the back of her thighs as he sits her on what she assumes is his kitchen island. She can’t really tell. All she really cares about is how good Bellamy’s mouth feels as he’s licking the spot under her ear that just moments ago he was sinking his teeth into. 

“Fuck, Clarke.”

 _Yes, fuck me_ , she thinks. 

But clearly, Clarke should’ve said that out loud because instead, Bellamy places his hand on her thighs and steps a little further out between the crook of her thighs. 

“We need to talk first.”

“Can we talk after?” Clarke’s voice comes out all gravelly. 

Bellamy swallows. “I really need to know this is not a one-time thing because otherwise, I don’t really think I want to know what I can have only once.”

Clarke sighs. She guesses she has to spell this one out for him. 

She kicks off her heels first before jumping off the counter top. Bellamy steps back, giving her wide berth as if he’s expecting her to bolt off. 

But instead she starts walking towards his bedroom, her finger finding the zip of her dress and yanking it down. 

She doesn’t bother to check and see if Bellamy’s following her. 

Once she’s in his room and she has her dress pooled at her feet, she turns to face him. She steps out of the mess she made of her dress and steps back until she feels the edge of his bed against the back of her legs—all the while keeping eye contact with him. 

“There is no way this is a one-time thing, Bellamy.”

He lets out a strangled groan, and soon she doesn’t feel the bed behind her legs but rather underneath her whole body, Bellamy pining her against it. 

“Thank God.” 

Clarke full on laughs, because this has got to be the best night of her life. 

Bellamy looks up from his task of nosing the valley between her breasts and flashes her a grin. “I intend to take you out on a date someday.”

“You better,” Clarke breathes, because by now Bellamy has unclasped her bra and has wrapped his lips around her nipple. 

“You have the world’s best boobs,” Bellamy declares as he’s smattering kisses across her chest. 

Clarke hums, too busy with her task of feeling every bit of skin revealed as she unbuttons his shirt. 

Once his shirt hits the floor, Bellamy starts trailing kisses down her stomach and across the waistband of her panties. He’s got his fingers hooked into the band, but has yet to inch them down, content with bitting into her hips. 

“Bellamy, please,” Clarke whines, lifting her hips in hopes that he gets the message.

He drops one last peck on her sternum before fully ridding Clarke of her last piece of clothing.

Soon it becomes a dance. A push and pull between their bodies, slick and hot. 

There’s a moment in between, after Bellamy hit a spot that made Clarke see stars and rip his mouth from hers to cry out her pleasure, that things slow down. The furious grinding of hips and clutching of skin becomes softer, slower. She meets his eyes and everything zeroes in on the sweat tricking down from his forehead to the crinkle of his left eye.

Clarke doesn’t know how to explain it.

It just makes sense. Whatever it is, she doesn’t quite know. But it’s like the unknown suddenly doesn’t seem quite as frightening. 

“Clarke,” he whispers, like trying to say that yes, he gets it. He gets it too. 

She kisses him then, slowly first, so slow that it doesn’t feel like it belongs in the middle of their furious coupling. 

Soon, she feels Bellamy’s tongue wrap itself around her own and suddenly everything’s fast again. Everything is coming at full speed again and this she understand—this she knows how to tread. 

They’re wound up again to the point that they have to stop kissing because it’s all gasps and moans escaping their lips. The rhythm they’ve built is losing its tether and suddenly they’re losing touch with everything else but the parts where they’re connected, from the press of his fingers against her cheek, her lips pressed against his neck, and to the most intimate part of him buried in her. 

The aftermath finds them laying together. She has yet to remove herself from on top of him. They are laying with their chests pressed together, her breathing into his neck while his breaths ruffle the fine hairs on her forehead. She has her fingers still clutching his shoulders while his are tracing constellations against her bare back.

“Sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow,” he manages to croak out. 

She shifts so she’s curled around his side, nodding in agreement as he disposes of the condom and pulls the sheet up to cover their sated bodies. 

__________

 

Clarke is roused by the smell of coffee wafting in from the kitchen. 

She takes note of the empty space beside her, the sheets still warm where Bellamy slept. 

She sighs, rubbing her eyes. Bellamy is a smart and responsible man, it makes the most sense to have this conversation when they have caffeine in their system and are both fully clothed. 

She takes her time finding something to wear. Clarke has a thing against wearing old underwear and refuses to slip on her panties from last night, so she first rifles through Bellamy’s drawers and puts on a pair of dark navy boxers. Next she finds one of Bellamy’s old school shirts haphazardly thrown over his desk chair. Smiling faintly as she recognizes the light grey shirt from the countless of times she’s seen him wear it during their undergrad years, she pulls it over her head. The cotton is soft and worn and smells like Bellamy and she idly wonders if she can claim it as hers if they decide to go any further into whatever this is.

The shirt falls halfway down her thighs, the boxers she’s donning barely visible underneath. With trepidation, she leaves Bellamy’s room. 

She finds him with his back turned towards her, he’s leaning against the kitchen island, probably glaring at the coffee maker. He’s shirtless and she can’t decide if it’s a good thing or a bad thing. He has his hands folded against his chest, stretching his shoulders and making his back muscles prominent and all Clarke can think is, _yeah, last night definitely cannot be a one time thing_.

She clears her throat, because right now is not the time to be thinking that. They need to have a responsible and clear conversation about feelings, okay. And if things work out, then Clarke can think like that. 

Bellamy turns towards her, his expression faintly amused but she can trace the apprehension on his face. His lips are slightly parted, and Clarke remembers how his lower lip felt between her own. His hair is a wild mess, with the ends sticking up from where he probably tugged at it. She gets a flashback of how his hair felt between her fingers as she tugged at it countless of times last night, and the responding groan he let out whenever she did so. 

He pushes his glasses up from where it’s slowly trailing down the bridge of his nose, the clunky frames she remembers teasing him about when he first got them. 

He’s such a fucking dork and Clarke loves him. 

She can’t help the grin that stretches across her face from the revelation. 

Sure, she’s thought about it. But she’s never really put it into such simple terms. It was always a jumbled mess of thoughts and feelings that Clarke always put aside and tried to ignore. Now being able to freely admit that she loves him, it feels like conquering the chaos in her mind that is Bellamy Blake and wrapping it all up with a nice pretty pink bow and acknowledging its beauty rather than diminishing it. 

He smiles back, his matching grin turning into a laugh. And Clarke is suddenly brimming with so much happiness and giddiness that she feels it all the way down to the tips of her fingers. 

“So about that date—“

He didn’t finish the rest because Clarke was on him then, and yeah, life is good.

**Author's Note:**

> all mistakes are my own.  
> find me on [tumblr](http://pegschuylerr.tumblr.com/).


End file.
